VOYAGE OUTWARDS JJ
I grabbed by the arm the New Yorker, who had not finished
Mallory, and dived under a stationary taxi at the sidewalk
edge.
. . . That car following the taxi was covered with cops
firing guns at everything. The taxi stopped just level with us;
in its lighted interior sat a pallid mummy.
. . . The cops lugged him out. A large one mussed him
up in the face; a larger one from behind; a little one had a
try at his ear-hole. He swayed backwards and forwards,
silently, without protest, like the toy soldiers, set into half
bullets that we used to have as children.
"And there came an arm and hand above the water and met
the sword and caught it, and so shook it twice and brandished
it and then vanished away, the hand with the sword in the
water. But ever in the barge the ladies and the queens wept
and shrieked that it was pity to hear. . . ."
. . . "I'm not a writer," says the New Yorker who had
said that aloud. "Hemingway's a good writer—for just the
writing. You think him one of the best, don't you? But this
seems to me better than Hemingway. Or isn't it?"
§
. . . / detest Hemingway, says the soft-voiced Communist.
He detests Hemingway, all blood-lusting writers, all
bourgeois artists. They are nothing but the props of the
Capitalist. He'd stand the whole lot of them up against
a wall. Modern Art is all wrong. In its inspirations; in its
methods. Healthy art can come from nothing but the study
of conditions of your own day. Of the life around you.
I assert in my gentle voice that he could read those very
words in a preface I wrote in 1906.
He says: "Tour* with the infinite contempt you bestow
on the completely senile.
"And," I continue gently, "I've written the same thing
hundreds of times since."
He gets away, then, to a good start. A torrent of words in a
gurgly, throaty, sweet voice. Blood, fire, extermination.
Up against a wall. All artists, musicians, singers who are the